This application relates to optical transmitters and receivers, and more specifically, to techniques and systems for aligning an optical transmitter and an optical receiver in an optical transceiver in a free-space optical communication system.
An optical transceiver may be designed to include an optical transmitter with a light source such as a laser to transmit an output optical beam and a photosensor to receive and detect an input optical beam. Such a transceiver can be used to establish a full-duplex or half-duplex optical communication link with another optical transceiver in a free-space optical communication system. In one class of optical transceivers, the optical transmitter and the optical receiver are mounted to a motorized turret and are fixed relative to each other. Hence, both the direction of the optical transmitter and the direction of the optical receiver change in the same manner with the movement of the turret.
In such a system, when the output beam of a first transceiver is received by the receiver of a second transceiver, it is desirable that the output beam from the second transceiver also hits the receiver of the first transceiver in order to establish a two-way communication.
The present techniques and systems include an alignment system to align the receiver relative to the transmitter of a transceiver so that two of such transceivers can establish an initial communication link by adjusting their respective turrets, without changing the relative alignment of the transmitter and receiver within each transceiver.